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The 50 Worst Videogame Names of All Time
Game Revolution has a great feature looking at fifty of the worst-named games ever to require a controller. They dig deep here, unearthing gems like 'Yo! Noid!', 'Awesome Possum Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt!', and 'Huygen's Disclosure'. From the article: "From Dick Butkus to Hootie and the Blowfish to Lake Titicaca, bad names have been with us forever. But thanks to the inevitable collision of reclusive nerds, bizarre artists and painfully unhip marketing execs, the video game industry enjoys some of the worst names of all. The following list was compiled after hours of lively debate, pages of exhausting science and one actual geek fistfight."
Dumb name aside, it was an awesome game.
If I go through my B-Movie collection, one thing's for sure: They could have redone it all with essentially the same crap setup and added "IN 3D"
No wait, MS just did with XP and Vista...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
..."Dominion: Storm over Gift 3" by Ion Storm.
{{ Ummm.... }} {{ English }} {{ Do you have it? }}
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
Close... I think it was supposed to be King Kong.
I am at a loss to explain it but there seems to be a relationship between the word king and donkey in Japanese at lease when translating it into English because I have seen this in other places.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
Wild Woody huh... Could've been worse, they could have had a sequel. "Wild Woody meets Mad Pussy" or something
Infiltrated dot Net
Awesome Possum was pretty cool. I remember playing it when I was six or seven...and annoying the hell out of whomever was in the room with me by turning "motor mouth" on.
#47 - Jumpman. Was there really a better name for it?
Prove it.
This list of 50 badly named games doesn't even have XPlay's "worst named game" Tube Slider or even my perennial favorite Spawn In The Demon's Hand. Not even a mention of Capcom's "Street Fighter" sequelitis with "Super Street Fighter II Turbo" or "Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha".
Speaking of sequels, there are games like "Mega Man X" (right after MM6) and "Wizards and Warriors X" (sequel to W&W2, I believe) that just confuse people as to what game they are playing. Hey, what's all this "Super Castlevania IV" about? Is it better than regular old "Castlevania IV"?
Gah, now I need to make my own list.
It was an awesome game. Clever and thoughtful. I wish I still had the NES cart..
Lake Titicaca! Lake Titicaca!
Why do we sing of its fame?
Lake Titicaca! Lake Titicaca!
'Cause we really like saying its name!
Indeed...I actually enjoyed several on this list. Tactics Ogre beats Final Fantasy Tactics hands down. Beyond the Beyond was a fine RPG, at least as far as I played (I had to return it, and then the Blockbuster closed down). Awesome Possum was at least amusing, if nothing ground-breaking.
I heard that the Nintendo mascot was supposed to be named "Monkey Kong" but there was a translation snafu.
But you reminded me of another gawd-arful game name - "Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Offical Game of the Movie"
Surprised it didn't make the cut.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
How is Skidmarks (plan-view racer on the Amiga) not on there? That's got to be /the/ worst videogame name of all time, bar none!
Oh no... it's the future.
By the way, the Japanese word for king is "oh". It sort of rhymes with the word "grow" if it had no w - "gro".
Yes, the game was actually called Linkle Liver Story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkle_Liver_Story
...tend to consist of randomly thrown-together English words as it is.
I think you missed the word "Names" in the article title.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Actually, I recall that Wargasm's title had little to do with the game (beyond the "War" part, anyway). To quote IGN: "Apparently someone at DID's marketing department thought that the 'kids' might dig it if they took their latest action title, put a woman in a bulging flak jacket on the cover (maybe she's carrying a bunch of grenades) and named it after something sexual. The PR staff picked up on the Beavis and Butthead vibe and began sending us sheaves of mail with jokes like 'It's time for Wargasm' and 'Multiple Wargasm.' After this ridiculous blitzkrieg of banality (which must have humiliated the actual design team beyond measure) Tal, Jason and I began furiously scrapping over who was going to have to review a game that was sure to be as embarrassing on the inside as it was on the out. I lost (for those of you who keep track of such things, let me warn you that Jason carries brass knuckles) and sadly loaded the game only to find that there was nothing within the actual software that had anything to do with the title, the chick on the cover or anything else we received in the mail. What I did find was a solid action game that is surprisingly hard to put down." So the name clearly turned people off to the game who might otherwise have enjoyed it. That's about as bad as a name can be.
I preferred the old 7UP Spot game for the Genesis. That one was actually fun.
Floppy missed the list... come on, that definitely is a suggestive name for a game. Of course, Irritating Stick's cover art is classic! That just hurts to even look at.
stuff |
Miyamoto's said as much in his interviews.
We are talking about worst game NAMES, not worst GAMES. Though if you're only creative enough to add on the system's name to whatever it is you're making...
When I saw the name, I thought an "orgasm of war" (meaning lots of intense fighting), no sex involved. Adding "gasm" onto something doesn't necessarily mean sex, just intensity, to me anyway (like Dane Cook's Tourgasm, for example). Marketing is comepletely different, and if the ads, boxcover, etc..., implied sex, then that's not the actual title's fault.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
I'm partial to the video game "King and Balloon" because of the juxtaposition of two such unrelated nouns.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Though I am not sure it can be called a "game"
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
The number one worst named game on the list is based on a real Japanes gameshow where contestants carry a metal rod through a maze with electrified walls, where the walls are only slightly wider than the stick.
I love the Japanese!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's a list of worst game _names_, not worst games. I'm sure some other ones are perfectly fun as well.
D'oh. I'm so glad all those English classes are paying off.
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
The main character is a lammy who, um, 'jammy's on her guitar.
http://crummysocks.com
Because they asked about using King Kong, and the guy at MCA was a real jackass?
"Nations of the World" also names regions that have not been nations ever and, as I recall, even a city or two.
Chris Mattern
Oh, and who could forget the classic Street Fighter:The Movie:The Game? I mean, it was a game about a movie that was based on a game. Has that ever been done before? Movies based on arcade games almost universally suck. And video games based on movies also suck. But a video game based on a movie based on an arcade game? That approaches a level of suckitude that almost cannot be measured. Oh, and getting back on topic: The name sucked too.
Worst videogame NAMES, several of the games on the list are pretty good, but have goofy or bad NAMES.
That's why I couldn't find the game! I was looking for 7UP Spot on the NES, not the Genesis. Thank you sir!
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
When the game doesn't involve any playing, they call it an "interactive novel."
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
It's "Worst Videogame Names", not just "Worst Videogames".
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
TFA is about the worst videogame names ever, not the worst games ever.
There is MM7, 8 and 9, they just didn't happen to come to the US. I believe the Japanese nameis Rockman, not Megaman, but still.
You can see the same thing with Final Fantasy: 1, 2, 3, 7. WTF? Well there really were 6 before 7. 1 was a dual release, 2 and 3 were NES games, never came to the US. 4 was released in the US but numbered 2 here (and we only got the easy version). 5 wasn't released, 6 was released as 3. Finally Square decided to dispense with the bullshit and release the games as the orignal numbers in the US, and without dumbing down the translations.
As for Super Castelvania, simple naming convention of the time. Many launch titles for the Super Nintendo were prefixed with Super. This was done both as a marketing gimmick, but also as to help people avoid confusion. CV4 was a sequel, but not for the NES as the first 3 had been.
I'm sorry, but that one made me just laugh out loud. Oh, the terrible, hilariously inapropriate places one can go with that one. But even without any innuendo, it's still a ridiculous name. Say it with me: "Milk and Nuts" I mean whats it supposed to make you think?
I'm inclined to agree with you.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Oh, right. Names. Not the games themselves. Goddamn I'm dumb.
Then yes, it was dumb.
I was wondering why so many of these games weren't actually that bad. Well, there ya go.
I don't know if you're being serious, but you're wrong: Pong is actually a decent head to head game.
... I'm not kidding, that's from 1976.
For starters: the name is a reasonably clever reduction of Ping Pong.
Heh, and some people got into it, at least enouugh so that it had its own strategy guide!
The gameplay works well because of the ricochet mechanic: you want to get the ball on the corner of your bat so it's a sharper angle, but go too far and you'll miss it.
Of course I might be biased, I wrote a sequel to it that combines it with Joust on the Atari 2600: JoustPong / Flap-Ping (Atari's lawyers are still cranky about the name "Pong"....) If you thought the control scheme of Pong was simple...JoustPong just needs a single click pushbutton!
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I always thought "Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine" was a dumb name. The Japanese version was the same game but called "Puyo Puyo". Much more fun to say!
But I thought it was funny.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Unfortunately, I can't remember the source, so take it as you will.
In an interview with Miyamoto, he said that he wanted to call the game "Stubborn Monkey" (because the monkey wouldn't give Jumpman/Mario's woman back). After the standard Engrish translation, Stubborn became Dnokey, and Monkey became Kong, giving us the title we've been seeing for the last quarter-century.
I'm surprised at the article not taking 'the easy way out' by listing countless Japanese titles that have been lost in translation. Regardless, I've always felt lemental Gear Bolt deserves some kind of honorable mention in the field. Even in Japanese the name sounds excessively weird.
How is Zzyzzyxx not on the list but Bad Dudes vs. Drangon Ninja is? Bad Dudes was a sweet name on an awesome (at the time) game. Zzyzzyxx wasn't even pronounceable. How were you supposed to talk to your friends about it (not that it was worth talking about).
I'm BAD! This list, however, is not.
Why is this on the list... it made perfect sense (Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere) if you remember the ton of flesh-colored little figures you could collect. I think I had a few of them myself.
I have to say, Seaman is a really bad game name!
And from the overused "titles with colons" department, the synonym-heavy (and possibly language-barrier-assisted) "Chasm: The Rift" (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/chasmtherift/in dex.html). Didn't sell well enough to release the sequels: "Orifice: The Hole" and "Hemidemisemiquaver: The Sixty-Fourth Note".
They forgot my personal favorite : 'Ninja Golf'. Yes, ninjas playing golf, that's exactly what it is ...
I have the 7up Spot game for the NES. It's a lot of fun.
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
Okay, I played the original Ogre pocket game. It was pretty cool. One player plays the part of one very large, very powerful battle tank. The other player plays a swarm of small, fast-moving, easily swatable mini-battlebots. The object is to destroy the other guy. Neat tactical war game.
But where in the !@#$ did they come up with "Let Us Cling Together"? I'm guessing it is where the minibots can cling together to create one large bot. Defeats the whole point of the original and is an incredibly stupid name (hence its place in this list). Had to have been a marketing droid that came up with this one.
But why is the rum gone?
I remember what ended the "Avoid the Noid" campaign, or at least so I thought.
Back in 1989, a guy named Kenneth Noid held up a Domino's in Georgia and kept the employees hostage for 6 hours. The man was paranoid delusional and thought that the campaign was directed specifically at him. The stand-off ended with no one hurt, and I believe the guy got off with an insanity plea.
I remember this in the news when I was a kid, because I'm from Georgia. It was "the big story" that day.
Turns out though, according to the Wikipedia, the campaign was actually ended becase the artist who created the character wanted more money. That's kind of disturbing in a way.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Atari 2600: Name this Game. Like they couldn't figure out a name, so you're supposed to name it yourself. Or maybe it was a note from the programmers to the marketing team: Name this Game. So instead of naming it, they just used what the programmers penciled in.
God spoke to me.
My older brother and I, back when we slept in bunk beds, used to shine flashlights and chase each other's lights around the ceiling. Come to think of it, that was before Pong rocked our world. The flashlight game was a lot of fun.
How well I remember that epochal moment when, at Grandma's house on vacation, we discovered Pong. Grandma had it connected to her remote controlled TV set. (The remote caused the physical channel dial to turn, ka-chunk ka-chunk, around.) Pong was a heck of a party game, mostly because you couldn't play it solo. The AI for a computer paddle opponent wasn't quite there yet.
On the plus side: essentially no load time! Flip the switch and it's on, baby.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Wow, that is a lot more than I needed to know about you. Next, you'll say you rolled them into all 36 great holes one at a time.
Engrish didn't count in their name choices. Made things way too easy if they tried to.
As I recall, "Donkey" was thought by Shigeru Miyamoto to be a synonym for "stubborn" in English. Which is kind of correct, but it doesn't really work.
qntm.org
I only know of 16 - 18...holes
The whole article was rather blah, but worth the time because of this blurb on "Huygen's Disclosure":
Spoiler Warning: Each point of an advancing wave front is in fact the center of a fresh disturbance and the source of a new train of waves; and the advancing wave as a whole may be regarded as the sum of all the secondary waves arising from points in the medium already traversed. Sign us up!
Last post!
The article says this about the 1994 game Awesome Possum:
Um, no it's not. I believe Berzerk was one of (if not the) first games to use digitized voice...and that was fourteen years before Awesome Possum. Why does does it seem that so many online video game reviewers/reporters/etc. think video games were invented in the mid-nineties?
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
But where's Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge (now with free scoring pencil!)? My Dinner With Andre? SimReich? Angus Pogordny's Caber Toss? Razor Fight II: The Slashening? And so on...
qntm.org
...but I always thought most videogame consoles had lousy names. I mean, to start with. Did anybody else here think "GameCube" was a dumb name for a console? At least compared to its codename, Dolphin. Xbox? PlayStation - sounds like a pre-school toy. SNES? MegaDrive? Game Boy? Just think about them for a while. Tell me I'm not the only one who thinks this.
Of course, the fact of the matter is that console names grow on you after a short while. Like a joke getting old quickly. Nobody would dream of laughing at the names PlayStation or Game Boy nowadays. Six months from now nobody will raise an eyebrow at the name of the Nintendo Wii.
And, for some reason, the consoles with relatively "sophisticated" names - Phantom, Nuon, Jaguar, anybody? - tend to sink without trace...
qntm.org
I would say "Worst Names" are names of games that fall under not living up to the games thaey are associated with, such as "Final Fantasy" (which is now up to 'Final' number 12?)
Anything that is 'ultimate' would also apply. As mentioned "Microsoft Works" gets a lot of such ribbing for general purpose apps. I guess also for a name to be the worst also would be an offenseive in some way or other, which had lead to the sbysmal sale of whatever it was on (even if it was good). So "Microsoft Genuine Advanatage" (advantage for?) or "Plays For Sure" (for sure, anythjing??) would fall into thhe worst names category. I got another one "Nintendo Virtual Boy\" probably one of the worst uses for Virtual in a game!
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
It's Superman. N64 games had a tendency to have 64 attached to their names. What makes Superman 64 a worse name than, say, Super Mario 64?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
the story i've heard is that they wanted the title to connotate foolishness...... one of the translations from japanese for that was "ass," and clearly "Ass Kong" was not an acceptable name.. so they got another name for Ass, and got..... Donkey. no idea how true that is, but i like this story better than "stubborn monkey"
No, Donkey kong wasn't on the list. And to think I expected it to be #1.
Look, the explaination donkey=stubborn may be somewhat logical. But that's like Shortieflakey instead of Microsoft!
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Clearly, the author has never heard of this gem from Japan. You drive an ambulance around hitting zombies.
FUN!
Most of the games on the list are quite old. They come off as being silly/stupid but still amusing. 'Princess Tomato in Salad Kingdom'? Sounds like a game I tried to write on my old C-64. But with modern media blasting us with ad-driven content, we get to see new lows in game-naming space. Here's a fairly recent entry that should have made the list:
Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie
Make fun of Ninja Hamster and Cacoma Knight in Bizyland all you want, but at least those game titles dont sound like a press release to some merchandising tie-in.
I actually laughed harder at "if it moves, shoot it" than any other title on that page. I guess it was more 'funny' than it was 'bad', though.
Mark of the Coder fades from you. You perform Opening on World of Warcraft. Warcraft crits GPA for 4. GPA dies.
It was supposed to be Stubborn Ape. They translated Stubborn badly and got "donkey" (which are well respected for their stubborn qualities).
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
I always thought that "Wargy" would have been a better name for multiplayer Wargasm.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Berzerk used a voice synthesizer, so it doesn't qualify as digitized voice.
Besides, an earlier example of digitized voice is Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple 2 by Silas Warner of Muse Software. I'm not sure enough to call it the *first* game to use it, but it is one of the earliest.
Here's a link about the game:
http://www.wolfenstein.org/fanclub/castle_wolfens
Reminds me of this.
Particularly since I found out it's not a Japanese game.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Wiki
Your aboslutely right. I did miss that.
;-)
I would have to agree then, "JumpMan" is a horrible name
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
The exact etymology of Donkey Kong's title is debatable. My favourite honest-to-goodness botched transliteration is that great big-top racing sim, Continental Circus.
For Sega CD... much worse than any of these, except maybe Wargasm =P
Circumcision is child abuse.
There's an RPG that came out not too long ago called "Drag-On Dragoon". I had to read the name a few times to believe it, myself. So, what is the game about? Knights that drag giant fire-breathing lizards behind them?
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Aaah, I'm surprised this didn't get on there. With all the other games up there whose names are great engrish sexual innuendos, you'd think a Korean game where you stick your finger up people's butts would make the cut.
Well, it could have been worse ... you could have spent hours of your youth playing "Ass Kong."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Half-Life
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2: Episode 1
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Wow, The guide says a shot to the corners is unhittable. Never knew that, but then again, I never played Pong that much. Seems like that would be really irritating, but maybe it adds a bit of extra strategy to the game. Did that only apply to the arcade, or to the various versions of home Pong, too?
Oh, and Flap-Ping does look interesting. Never thought I'd spend $20 on a 2600 game, but I guess that shows how young I am.
I knew that had to be on there. It was pretty fun for a mindless hack 'n slash and came out during a lull in the CRPG business.
Best title evar: Zombies Ate My Neighbors. luh dat
Whoever modded the parent post Insightful has a seriously twisted sense of humor. Bravo.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
FTFA : "Hey! You got your nuts in my milk! Hey! You got your milk on my nuts! Mmmmm."
Am I the only one surprised that they didn't come up with : "Hey! I got milk in my nuts!" instead?
You just got troll'd!
Agreed. I'm hoping whoever metamods them gets the joke.
Could you imagine being the graphic artist tasked with having to come up with cover art for some of these games? What are those creatures on the cover of "PenPen Trilcelon"? Maybe the game designers where going for something emphasizing the intensity of war and the artist/marketing department was confused. I could see the same title being used with a "Dr. Strangelove" like theme.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
Could someone post the list??? I'm blocked out.